Maintaining academic integrity is a growing concern for higher education, increasingly so due to the pivot to remote learning in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We canvassed students, faculty, and tutors at an online Canadian university about their perspectives on academic integrity and misconduct. The survey asked how the university could improve policies concerning issues of academic integrity, how faculty and tutors handled cases of misconduct, about satisfaction with how academic violations were treated, and about the role of students, (...) faculty, and tutors in encouraging academic integrity. As well, we collected suggestions from respondents for reducing cheating, addressing academic misconduct, and general ideas about academic integrity. The distinction between misconduct and integrity was not always clear in their comments. We received responses from 228 students and 73 faculty and tutors, generating hundreds of comments. In this paper we focus only on the answers to open-ended questions. Using content analysis, we categorized the replies into similar threads. After multiple iterations of analysis, we extracted three general recommendation groupings: Policy and Procedures, Compliance and Commitment, and Resources. Based on respondents’ views, we propose a balanced approach to supporting academic integrity. Although we conducted the study pre-COVID-19, the recommendations apply to current and future academic integrity practices in our context and beyond. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a culture-specific phenomenon, academic dishonesty remains an under-researched domain. The purpose of this study was to voice teachers’ perceptions of: the influential factors contributing to AD, the consequences of AD for the quality of teacher–student relationships, and the specific strategies for regulating TSR. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, we attempted to present a detailed description of teachers’ lived experiences regarding the above aims. The participants were English language and Mathematics teachers with different personal and professional characteristics working in (...) public high schools of Iran. Data was collected through intensive semi-structured interviewing and analyzed by a five-step approach applied to phenomenology in psychological research. Data analysis revealed three general themes regarding teachers’ perceptions with several components. We found that the lack of attention and intrinsic motivation were the prominent perceived factors with consequences for TSR. Also, personal talk and active supervision were the common techniques that teachers utilized with students who commit AD to manage and control the TSR quality. The results were discussed with reference to teachers’ academic discipline, gender, and teaching experience. (shrink)

Academic integrity is a complex problem that challenges how we view action, intentions, research, and knowledge production as human agents working with computers. This paper proposes that a productive approach to support AI is found at the nexus of behavioural ethics and a view of hybrid app-human agency. The proposal brings together AI research in behavioural ethics and Rest’s four stages of ethical decision-making which tracks the development of moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and finally moral action combined with (...) insights taken from Actor-Network Theory. This framework, bluntly named the Academic Integrity Model, positions AI as an effect of an entangled hybrid of human-technology actors moving through distinct but related steps towards ultimately mobilising ethical learning behaviours. This model highlights the importance of developing socio-techno responsibility in students and suggests that approaches to address academic integrity performances such as contract cheating, collusion and plagiarism should include considerations of the complex nature of app-centric students. (shrink)

This paper presents a cross-sectional study that demonstrates how King Abdulaziz University has responded to the lockdown imposed by the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of students and faculty towards assessment that had to take place online due to physical or social distancing rules and lockdowns. A descriptive mixed-method study was conducted with two different self-administered questionnaires that were developed for students and faculty, respectively. (...) A total of 547 responses were received from undergraduate students and 213 from faculty. The main finding suggests the need for a multilevel approach to the problems of cheating and plagiarism, including raising student awareness and ethics, training teachers to detect cheating methods, and institutions activating their code of practice and applying severe sanctions on those who engage in such practices. (shrink)